What do you want to see in the next game?

(SockDog) #81

They’re world rules and unfortunate limitations of the crafting simulation. On the world scale people have made incredible machines and even computers. You can’t point at the flaws of a simulation and say that justifies creating rules to limit the player because you want to impose a metagame on them.

Honestly. If you want to admit that you want a lower skill ceiling and wider appeal because it takes less effort then I can accept that. It’s something many gamers expect. But to suggest that you’re adding to the game by taking away so much freedom is totally laughable.

(tokamak) #82

I really think it’s worthwhile to think the accusations through before you make them.

There’s no point in pinning a game down to a particular skill level, certainly not in multiplayer games. If I can be accused of anything then it’s of having a desire to have a game that has room for many different niches in which gamers can bring their own specific talents to fruition. The idea that players are competing on the basis of one singular skill is completely a myth. There are multiple ways in which players can excel in a game, and if we want to bring them altogether and make them all count then it’s going to require complex and intelligent systems to make sure all that is useful is acknowledged and rewarded.

Then you seem to have a liking for environment based resources. Nothing wrong with that but any system or example in which you think it should be implemented in a team-based tactical shooter is lacking entirely. What’s also lacking is a unified resource system. The only thing players can do is collect materials through any means (looting/mining, whatever) that’s actually way more restrictive than an abstract system that weighs and rewards the consequences of player’s actions. Healing and killing, constructing and sabotaging are all things that are checked and rewarded accordingly.

Then on top of that all, I don’t really see how a deepening the context of the environment bites any abstract system on top of it. As far as I can see it both work together. You can make a gaming environment where players able to extract more power from interactable objects. I’m thinking about an engineer drawing materials from a vehicle wreckage in order to build a machine gun nest, deployable or a different vehicle. I’m thinking about players looting the other for less mundane things, like an unlocked passive skill that allows a player more power (energy/accuracy/stamina etc) for every friendly dogtag he collects.

I fully agree that there’s a lot of gameplay to be found in environmental interaction. I’d also love to see objectives become more dynamic (like the trains and the cave flooding). But you shouldn’t forget that these are all ideas for the actual in-game gameplay. No matter how much of this fun stuff you implement, ignoring the meta layer on top of it would be missing a lot of tools and opportunities to balance the game further and make it a more rewarding and fulfilling exercise as a whole.

(SockDog) #83

Stop being so (deliberately?) obtuse. The example is to illustrate how a game can flourish without the need for restrictive rules to compensate for skills and knowledge. At no point have I said that SD should make a Minecraft fps or emulate it, only that they shouldn’t limit the FPS in order to put in a secondary system. To spell it out for you, as I have numerous times in the past, learning movement techniques to increase speed is far more gratifying and has to be said a lot less consistent than unlocking a x0.5 speed perk for farming X amount of XP. They should stop wasting time developing a system to drive another system that ultimately limits what players can do and instead look at ways of implementing freedom within the confines of the game so that people actually have to learn, practice, become skillful and consistent in employing that freedom.

(tokamak) #84

Now we’re ALL the way back to cognitive and cerebral. If you can’t appreciate that there can be so much more to a game than merely hand-eye coordination then there’s no point in taking this further, it’s like explaining the colour yellow to a blind guy.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with rules. Rules are what makes the game. A game where anyone can do anything is a completely pointless affair.

(DarkangelUK) #85

[QUOTE=tokamak;406932]
That’s a humongous list of limitations and rules. It’s large, and a lot is possible, sure, but anything you want to make has to happen within the confines of the paths already set out by the developer.[/QUOTE]

Seems you’re failing to grasp and understand exactly what emergent gameplay is.

More beyond cognitive and cerebral = grind thus removing diversity in skill factor and ability… he who plays the most has the most. Fake ability with repetition, fake accomplishments with menial tasks… fake skill with unlocks. Sounds like a boring ass game to me.

(SockDog) #86

[QUOTE=tokamak;406938]Now we’re ALL the way back to cognitive and cerebral. If you can’t appreciate that there can be so much more to a game than merely hand-eye coordination then there’s no point in taking this further, it’s like explaining the colour yellow to a blind guy.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with rules. Rules are what makes the game. A game where anyone can do anything is a completely pointless affair.[/QUOTE]

You want to remove everything that isn’t hand-eye coordination and have it granted through unrelated actions. Learn movement to increase speed, create rule to prevent this and unlock movement speed perks. All you’re doing is removing abilities that people actually learn and implement to wide degrees of success and replace them with binary alternatives. The payoff, in your words, being that such limitations add depth when it fact they just remove a the human element. Ultimately the game becomes, as I’ve said ad nauseum, random top trumps with an FPS overlay as some kind of balancing element.

As far as making a game “cerebral”, given what SD has produced thus far, you’re going way off the mark. It’s a 20minute game that you want to introduce ridiculous rules into in the hope it’ll provide some strategic layer, that simply doesn’t work. Even at a low level you end up with something like Brink that’s schizophrenic in its goals and implementations. The best method thus far is to take a commander role and have them apply a strategy, expecting players to do so, prematch on a random pub server with people joining and leaving is simply a journey into a fantasy land.

And it’s a completely pointless affair if you ignore every open world and emergent gameplay title ever released. We, real people, operate within confines all the time and can still play and have fun. We create rules for games to ensure the game works properly and fairly, you don’t limit a soccer player’s abilities through rules just so that you can impose some skill ceiling that you’ll attempt to break through some arbitrary tertiary system.

(tokamak) #87

In my system, the only thing you can gain more by playing more is the rate at which you can adjust your boosters. All the rest is time-constrained within campaigns and therefore not a grind. Permanent development should be about extending your options rather than increasing the quantity of your in-game strength. At least Brink got that right, the problem with Brink was that developing character configurations wasn’t really, it allowed too much from the start and it was too restrictive while in the game. My system is the opposite.

That’s absolute nonsense. I want a game that caters to all. If you’re a good shot then you should be able to shoot yourself a way out of tough situations and if you’re a great tactician then you should be able to think your way out of tough situation. If you’re both then you will completely and utterly dominate everyone else, oops now I’m tailoring the game to myself again.

Still, most of all, I want players be able to asses themselves in order to know their strengths and weaknesses and then invest in these things before the battle commences. That’s an aspect that’s completely missing in lots of games.

(SockDog) #88

They can do this already, it’s called practice, learning from your mistakes, improving skills and being consistent. What you actually want to do is make it obvious and easier to correct those shortfalls. I’m a ****ty aimer so give me ton of armour and powerful spray gun, now I’m awesome. This isn’t depth, it’s penalising better players in order to even the field. What should happen is that person either takes up a role where aim is less critical or they practice to improve their aim.

(tokamak) #89

These are the kind of people you’re talking about.

Do you actually think that an analysis like this doesn’t require any inherent experience?

(Humate) #90

This is the only unlock strategy I would offer a newbie:

Spam deployables with nades on the 1st map till you have reduced spread.
For 80% of the campaign they will have an advantage over players of their own skill level.

But overall, I dont think the idea of planning out unlocks and the like is that significant or that useful.

(tokamak) #91

That’s a loophole within the system, not an inherent weakness of the system. These two get confused way too often around here. By tying the xp-income to the outcome of the match you bridge those holes without having to anticipate them in advance.

(DarkangelUK) #92

He who plays the most has the most, great for SP or coop, **** for a comp shooter.

(tokamak) #93

Again, every player will have the same amount of stuff. Only the rate at which they can replace that stuff for other stuff will require an investment on their part.

(BioSnark) #94

If you put invisible ‘landmine’ kill entities on preset locations across a shortcut, that takes experience to traverse while adding nothing of substance. Yet, at least this doesn’t detract from players who haven’t manipulated the system, joined after the start of the first map, or don’t want to do the same role all campaign, or lock public teams into poor class configurations.

(tokamak) #95

It’s a role you gave yourself though. It’s the way you figured you could be the most valuable class to your team across an entire campaign. It’s probably not the way you thought when you started the game or even when you were already a year into the game. These things evolve over time depending on your skils, your personal preference and the overarcing metagame. The point is that it took time, trial and error as well as analysis and imagination to come to your conclusions. Conclusions which could be entirely different for another individual. This means that a player’s experience doesn’t just lie in your muscle-memory or in your mental collection of sexy pakour routes through a map.

(DarkangelUK) #96

Thanks for clarifying that he who plays the most has the most (replace most with best if you wish).

Eliminate diversity and copy/paste players, this gets worse as you go on.

(tokamak) #97

Those who plays more will have more capacity to experiment and develop through trial and error. People who play less will have to think more about the choices they make as the opportunity cost is higher for them.

(DarkangelUK) #98

That’s exactly what CoD does, I thought you were against making clone games. I like that not a single person is convinced about this, and not only that, you’re actually doing a really good job and putting people off ever playing anything like it. In fact the best thing that’s ever come out of all of these hijacks of yours is clarifying that it’s a terrible idea that no one wants… and of course that it’s broken and will never work of course.

(tokamak) #99

It’s nothing like COD. There you grind for unlocks which eventually give you a complete collection to chose from. Better weapons take longer than weaker ones. In that way COD is more akin to Brink. It means that once a player has collected all the shiny stuff he’ll be left with that empty feeling any collector has up on completing his collection.

Under this system you will have to play more in order to change more. This has two huge advantages, firstly it means that the resources you earn in a match will always retain their value (especially if you let the changing cost accumulate and then decay over time, WoW talent style), and secondly it forces people to actually think about what they’re doing and stick to a certain build rather than hysterically trying it once and then tossing it away. It means that players who are ahead of the meta-game will have a huge lead on the rest it will take time for the rest to catch up to their unique ideas.

It’s rewarding exactly the right things in the game, dedication, commitment and innovation.

(DarkangelUK) #100

It’s exactly CoD without the ability to change loadout/perks/killstreaks once you’ve chosen them, no one wants a set builds in a comp fps, haven’t you learned anything from Brink? That was, in a basic form, exactly what you’re proposing. You want a system that doesn’t work with random pub squads, and the only crew it may work with is the competition crowd as they’re an organised team, yet they always have flat rulesets to keep both sides even so will never use that… exactly who are you aiming this at then?